Activism is increasingly instrumental, meaning it’s a form of power that is tied to the logic and algorithm of the status quo. This makes activism, even in the search for justice, a creature of the status quo, which renders hope and justice, as ironic as that sounds, a creature of the things we’re trying to leave behind.
— Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on Slowing Down in Urgent Times
it awoke me from sleep, the thought. A correction. something that clarified the feeling of not wanting to forgive, or not being able to. it’s trite, but three had always been my breaking point in this series of incursions, especially in those cases when there has been a latitude of attempted understanding and reasoning in between. the recipient of the gaslight, on the other hand does not calculate. how much is enough? the arbitrariness of numbers is probably less reasonable than the process of enduring or the tenacity of tolerating or the act of forgiving. actually on a certain level, it would be unreasonable——no?——to say to a friendship, to love, that i do not accept this anymore. right? W says there is no reason to 絕交 and we need time to learn and understand one another. of course. but what if i say simply that i am unable to continue like this? i do not like to count, but something keeps ticking. was it that which woke me from sleep?
perhaps it was the sudden clarity of watching an awkward transpiring of a series of very reasonable utterances of ‘not quite loyal’ words. the crispy field recordings of an anthropocene, brown noise wilderness that had kept me unconscious before came back again through the reverse journey from sleep into a dream-like scenario. i am in the post-apocalyptic game which we had romanced together last summer. so i am alone, but reflecting upon relationships that are perhaps no longer possible, and there is something forlorn and undone about this, though that’s what apocalypse is really. it’s drizzling and murky here all the time, here and there, we woke into dream and reality is simply a matter of perspective. it’s exactly that we argued about this, a simple difference of experience about something that happened in the past. you brought it up because you were hurt and disappointed, but what is meant by ‘not quite loyal’ is that hurt is prickly and dishonest if it only cowers behind rage. it’s reasonable, yes, like when i reason with myself that forgiveness is a higher ground. i’ve still never gotten there, still on game one（放下，不是放棄，而不是失去）, too short of an attention span for mantras.
how does she keep forgiving? it’s a questionably positive character trait these times around, a puzzle to play on both sides, like when S describes M’s bad quality of not being able to see anything negative of anyone else. I thought when she said it, oh, how strange that is! What’s so wrong with roses? But anyway, I am not M nor your ex-girlfriend, not so forgiving and not so resilient, maybe not so tolerant, not so enduring. i don’t want to calculate, but don’t know how to bear the unfair exchange of a wound for a blow, even if understand how I may be implicated in its opening. I am sorry, even, that I said something awkward and ambivalent when we played the game that time, but wasn’t it obvious that we were in the grey and murky chapter where awkward and ambivalent things are uttered? Is being sad and disappointed a violence already inflicted, with reasonably violent returns? That is the ambivalence of saying stupid things that you realise are stupid in the midst of voicing them, but there they are, your mouth is open, stupidity lays before you just as the person in front of you, the one who receives it while listening with an unwittingly ever so slightly peaked (piqued?) eyebrow. The person in front of you doesn’t say anything in this moment, of course——that’s what ambivalence does; it delays time in the staccato of its complexly unfurling hesitations, though the simultaneous folding in and folding over of affect leads to other arhythmic utterances for which connections are astray and hence may also be categorised as stupid. ‘retarded’ is a politically incorrect term these days, but it is exactly about the mismeasure of time rather than being wrong or right per se. Ambivalence is fair. Its slowness is an emphasis upon space rather than its surrounding points and prickles.
justice requires calculation. but i’m no heroine, and it’s always a bit more complicated than that.
Posted by 丫 | reply »les mains négatives
by marguerite duras
the heart is also a muscle
six visas and ten airports later. your life an extended non-place, where did the summer go?
the fear of atrophy.
you return after almost three months and find someone had picked up all the chestnuts again and placed them one by one on the brick ledge in the courtyard, like that autumn four years ago (“are the questions answers?”). the closest you could now get to a feeling of home.
nostalgia.
you’ve been writing that letter that you never want to end. when that letter ends, everything ends.
Posted by f | reply »time’sawastin’
sit down next to me
little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
gifting
spam
(looking through the spam folder, in lack of other responses (sigh), oh the things you discover in the trash..! but i wish you would say something, dear reader.. how are you today? here it’s cold and grey again, they call it the summer.. hmm.. time for more coffee now, a soft-boiled egg.. good morning!
oh and please make sure to let us know in case you are ‘saa’, ‘penilopa’, ‘domainmaster’, ‘chad’, ‘uyit’ or ‘blogger’ and your message mistakenly ended up in our spam..)
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